Mindfulness & Psychotherapy

What’s the POINT of Mindfulness?

Tuesday, February 17, 2015 · 7 Comments

The brain loves to chunk information in order to remember things and there are so many great acronyms that help us remember to bring mindfulness into our lives. I’m going to list a few really key ones and then link you to respective guided practices or posts as a reference to play with them and bring them into your life. Finally, I’m going to introduce you to a new powerful acronym that gets to the point of mindfulness.

This is an all time favorite. On YouTube the recording that I created for A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook has almost 80,000 views because the acronym makes sense and it really helps us pause into the moment and open up to what matters.

This acronym created by Michelle McDonald and popularized and adapted by Tara Brach, is incredible for helping us gain perspective, self-compassion and confidence with our difficult feelings. We also experience stepping into our natural awareness.

This is a practice from The Now Effect that was adapted from Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) for the purpose of helping us pop out of auto-pilot, steady our minds and deepen into the present moment.

This is a newer acronym from Uncovering Happiness that helps us find strength and confidence through vulnerability. It incorporates all the elements of self-compassion, including the experience behind our common humanity.

POINT (Pause, Open, Inquire, Non-identify, Truth)

Here is the latest acronym that I think gets to the essence of mindfulness and because there is no prior reference to this, I’ll spell it out here. There is certainly overlap with this and other practices (RAIN in particular), but I think this acronym is really fitting.

Pause – This is what we first are doing in a mindfulness practice, we’re simply pausing to step into that space between stimulus and response. This doesn’t mean we need to stop moving (although that can be helpful at times), but we’re pausing the auto-pilot.

Open – After pausing we’re opening to what’s here in the moment. Maybe it’s a person in front of us that we’ve been neglecting to listen to, or maybe we’ve been on a hike busy in thought and we’re opening to the nature around us, or maybe we’re feeling stress, anxious, sad, or some other uncomfortable feeling and we’re opening to the reality that, that is what’s there.

Inquire/Investigate – Here is where we go beyond just opening to what’s here, but now begin getting curious about it. We put on our beginner’s mind cap and inquiring into the experience. We can get curious about the emotion and the physical expression of it. How big is it? What is the shape? Does it have a color? As we do this and just allow it to be we might also notice if it stays the same or shifts around. We can investigate deeper by asking it what it’s believing. If it’s a negative emotion does it believe that “I’m not good enough,” or “Something is fundamentally wrong with me,” or maybe “I’ll never be able to get better at XYZ.” This could be any number of negative beliefs.We can even inquire into the thoughts themselves now with these four questions in Uncovering Happiness that I adapted from Byron Katie’s four questions.

Non-identify/Natural Awareness – As we begin to Pause, Open and Investigate we get space from the experience itself. We’re practicing settling deeper into a sense of awareness viewing the experience. The awareness is not wrapped up in the experience, the sensations, emotions and thoughts are arising within a wider awareness. There’s a sense of freedom in this, we’re not so identified with it anymore, it’s our natural awareness.

Truth – As we settle into this natural awareness we come to recognize the truth that fundamentally this is our refuge and is who we are beneath the ever-changing flux of daily experiences. We start to see that everyone has this same natural awareness beneath the masks they wear.Most importantly, we start to sense to truth that we are all connected in this way. Or as Thich Nhat Hanh says, “we inter-are.” This is a truth of humanity.

So there it is, when I’m asked what the point of mindfulness is, there are many reasons; stress reduction, helping alleviate our suffering, opening up to joy and gratitude are all wonderful intentions and worthwhile motivations to bring mindfulness into our lives.

And at the same time, underneath it all, there’s even a bigger picture, to begin experiencing the reality of our common humanity (or even our common being-ness in the universe). We are not islands and are far more connected than we realize.

Warmly,

Elisha

7 Comments

Sometimes acronyms are just more confusing for students. STOP is my favourite as it implies what you need to remember to do in the acronym.
The meaning of Sati is ‘to remember’
Every time we remember to STOP we’ve had a moment of mindfulness x

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